Earlier this week, I published a humorous article about my personal COVID-19 vaccination anecdotes using almost every trope and myth that I could invent using Bill Gates as a voice telling me things in my ears via a 5G connection to the nanobots in the vaccine. Of course, each bogus claim was linked to actual articles that refuted the nonsense.
Well, that article was widely shared (thanks friends), but a few of you got dinged for posting inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines. The good news is that Twitter is trying to regulate COVID-19 vaccine garbage. The bad news is that Twitter doesn’t get sarcasm.
I make a joke with my science pals, while we are trying to figure out how to get in on Bill Gates’s billions he pays for vaccine shills (once more, this is sarcasm), only intelligent people get sarcasm, satire, snark, and irony. Try using irony with anti-vaxxers, and they almost always don’t get it.
So, to rectify the situation, I am publishing this non-apology post that represents my persona (n=1) anecdotes about my COVID-19 vaccination experience. I’m going to give you a heads up, it’s totally boring.
My personal COVID-19 vaccination anecdotes
I received the vaccine on 23 March 2021 at a Kaiser Permanente medical facility in Southern California. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kaiser, they are a vertically-integrated, high-tech healthcare system, located mostly in California, but can be found in a few other states. Kaiser owns everything to serve its members – hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and even an associated medical school. Kaiser provides all aspects of healthcare from primary care to specialties like surgery, cardiology, psychiatry, and almost anything you could imagine. In addition, almost all of the healthcare workers are employees of the organization.
The reason I’m bringing this up is that anti-vaxxers hate Kaiser Permanente because they publish a lot of vaccine science articles. They can do this because they have a research arm that can provide powerful data for large case-control or cohort epidemiological studies that are critical to studying vaccine safety and effectiveness.
They can develop these powerful studies since they manage all aspects of the healthcare of an individual. Since I received the COVID-19 vaccination they can look beyond unscientific anecdotes and track me over months or years. So if I develop COVID-19, they can look back to see if and when I was vaccinated.
If I suddenly develop some autoimmune disease a year from now, they can determine whether it’s linked to anything including a vaccine.
Let’s get back to my COVID-19 vaccination and my personal anecdotes on the matter. I received the Moderna vaccine. Of course, it is an mRNA vaccine, the second one to receive an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the USA.
I received the vaccine in my left arm because I am right-handed, and in case there was any issue, I could still throw a baseball. At least, that’s what I imagined in my tiny reptilian brain.
Now, I have zero fear of needles. I’m one of those people who loves watching blood flow into Vacutainer™ tubes when I have blood drawn. The only time I got annoyed by vaccination was a yellow fever vaccine I received a few years ago before I took a business trip to Brazil. That was PAINFUL, and I couldn’t sleep on one side for at least a week. I do not recommend it.
So, after I received the vaccine, nothing happened. I am the most boring patient ever when it comes to vaccines because you can’t even tell if anything happened.
I had to wait about 30 minutes before leaving to determine if I would have an allergic reaction. I am not susceptible to allergies (I am allergic to precisely one drug, one that is only rarely prescribed), so I was not concerned.
In the days post COVID-19 vaccination, I just have no anecdotes to tell. Nothing happened. No fevers. No swelling. No headaches. No improved 5G reception. Like I said, boring.
Wait, just after the vaccination, I was picking up something in a big-box electronics store and an incompetent employee knocked a large display onto my arm nearly breaking it. My arm, not the display.
Vaccine-related? You never know, maybe I have to submit a report to VAERS?
More anecdotes
I wish I could tell you something interesting about my COVID-19 vaccination experiences because I could have written a discussion about whether it was vaccine-related or not. My best anecdotes may have been what I observed while receiving the vaccine.
Because I was in a large group who received their vaccines in a large conference room, I overheard a lot.
One gentleman was arguing with the nurse that he only wanted the Pfizer vaccine because he had read on the internet (obviously not this blog) that the Moderna version would change his DNA. The nurse didn’t explain adequately that first, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use the same technology, and second, these vaccines do not change your DNA.
But here’s the one anecdote that might matter. Of the 50 or so patients receiving the vaccine while I was there, no one fainted. No one had their arms fall off. No one had an allergic reaction. It was as boring as any other vaccination I have ever seen.
Oh, and there’s one more anecdote. My 5G enabled iPhone works the same as it ever had. I was seriously disappointed in that.
One last thing. Anecdotes have almost no meaning in science, they are not data points. And more anecdotes are still not data points.
Whether I or your favorite anti-vaxxer provides those anecdotes, they are still useless.
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